Where Mario & Luigi: Dream Team and Super Mario RPG Collide

Of all the Mario spin-off titles, the Mario & Luigi RPG series has taken some of the biggest risks with Nintendo’s platforming duo. Each sequel explores them as hilarious characters and uses a theatrical, animated style that fits in with contemporary cartoons. IGN spoke to developers from both AlphaDream and Nintendo about their latest creation, Mario & Luigi: Dream Team and got them to reflect on the origins of the series.

In Dream Team, Mario and Luigi travel back and forth between separate realities. Whenever Luigi sleeps on a magical pillow, a portal opens up into his dreams. Previously, the developers explored Bowser’s insides and even time travel. No idea seems too farfetched here. But how would AlphaDream characterize their relationship with Nintendo? Does it affect the writing or direction of these characters?

“The best way to address your question is by thinking about how the Mario & Luigi series differs from the action Mario games. Being an RPG, there are of course a lot more text messages. You’re having a lot more interaction with the characters in the game,” AlphaDream Producer Yoshihiko Maekawa said. “What this does is it allows us to have a much finer portrayal of individual characters and their personalities through the way that you’re speaking and interacting with them.”

Exit Theatre Mode

Maekawa told us that prior to the first installment of Mario & Luigi RPG, the team approached the project with a clean slate mentality because Luigi had never been portrayed with that level of detail. The team decided to insert an AlphaDream interpretation -- with the permission and support of Nintendo – into Luigi’s character, and thought about ways to make him interesting.

“I feel like AlphaDream has always been very careful with the Mario & Luigi series,” Maekawa added. “We understand that these are beloved characters that we’re dealing with, and so we have to take into account everyone’s feelings about those characters, and not lose sight of our own love of those characters and what makes them charming as we continue to refine their portrayals in a way we think is interesting.”

“Of course, at Nintendo, Mr. Miyamoto works on a very different series of Mario games. I think that’s entirely the point. They’re a different kind of fun, the action Mario games, as compared to these RPGs,” added Nintendo Producer Akira Ohtani. “That’s exactly the point. They need to be different. There wouldn’t be much use in creating another Mario game that was fun in the exact same way. The goal here has always been to find these new fun ideas that are a little bit different from what people have seen elsewhere.”

With each Mario & Luigi sequel, AlphaDream gets an opportunity to revisit the action command battle system -- a timing-based input system that lets players dodge or add power to standard turn-based attacks. Maekawa co-directed Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars before he helmed Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, so we asked him to share some of the lessons learned along the way.

In Dream Team, Luigi helps Mario out by sleeping on the job.

“The first time anyone encountered an action command battle system like that was in Super Mario RPG, which I was in fact involved with. That was very much inspired by a children’s toy that was available in Japan at the time. It was like a large laptop with these buttons that would play music. You had to press the buttons with good timing to the music. It was that idea, having gameplay built around timing button presses, that inspired me to hybridize these two genres of game, to get a little bit of action and RPG into the same game, ” Maekawa told IGN.

“Having Mario just be turn-based was something that didn’t feel very Mario to us at the time, when we were experimenting with it. Once we included these action commands, we did feel like we were bringing the more traditional Mario action gameplay feel, but melding that with an RPG.”

“Then, once we moved on to the Mario & Luigi series, I think there was another interesting evolution. That was that you could then start to dodge enemy attacks entirely, which you couldn’t do before. You could only reduce damage if you had good timing on a button press,” Maekawa said. “From the second and third installments of the game forward – and this is something we went back and forth on a lot with the battle planner at the time – we decided that it shouldn’t just be the buttons. You should also be able to use the direction pad and the circle pad. Now you can even use the gyro sensor for this function as well. I think that’s the evolution that’s brought us to the state it’s in today.”

After Super Mario RPG, Mario’s role-playing adventures split down the middle. The Mario & Luigi series went in one direction, while the Paper Mario series took similar concepts in a different direction. We asked Ohtani if Nintendo would ever consider returning to the original source of inspiration, Super Mario RPG or revisit Geno and Mallow and some of the characters that were created for it.

At this point in our conversation, Maekawa jumped in. Below is a transcript of their conversation.

Akira Ohtani: I’ve only ever worked on the Mario & Luigi series, and I wasn’t involved with Super Mario RPG, so I’m not sure I’m even the correct person to answer that question.

Yoshihiko Maekawa: Well, what’s your perspective, as a producer, about going back to that world and using characters like Geno and Mallow?

AO: Honestly, I think making new games is always a bit more appealing from my perspective. It’s okay to reuse some settings, like the Beanbean Kingdom, but we definitely want to introduce new characters and new gameplay ideas whenever possible.

Then a funny thing happened at our interview: Ohtani turned the tables around and asked us a question. “You guys really seem to like Super Mario RPG,“ he inquired. We responded that it’s actually a huge topic of conversation with the IGN readers around the world. A lot of people love that world that was created so long ago, and they really want to see a return to it someday -- especially Geno and Mallow.

Exit Theatre Mode

“Yeah, I really should admit that I do have to think a little bit harder about how to separate how I view older games from how I try to approach working on new games, “Ohtani explained. “Because I don’t want to end up in a situation where my mind is too clouded by nostalgia for old games, and I can’t focus on how to best explore new avenues and new ways of bringing fun and surprising experiences to people. But I recognize what you’re saying. I really should learn how to compartmentalize those two parts of my brain a little better, so I can at least go back and play some more interesting old games from time to time.”

“In this game, in Dream Team, we were able to bring back some characters from the first game in the Mario & Luigi series, that had appeared in the Beanbean Kingdom. These characters tend to be sort of minor characters that show up in less important areas, but they do have a few lines, and so you get to learn a little bit about what they’re up to now,” Maekawa elaborated.

“I was wondering if that might be some way to approach using Geno and Mallow in a future game, so that we’d still be able to look for fun new ideas like Mr. Ohtani was talking about. We wouldn’t get bogged down, but we could still provide a view of these characters for fans who really want to see one.”

IGN associate editor Jose Otero recently rediscovered the magic of Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. If you want to find out what other games he’s thinking about, follow him on twitter.